{"title":"Models for Commercial Education","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Arguments that higher education institutions should prepare the future private and public administrators of newly industrialising economies were general by the 1870s, but in all cases they involved the advocacy of commercial education. This was in fact the context in which economics developed to the 1950s in Britain outside Oxford and Cambridge, but these developments in Britain lagged those elsewhere in the world. This chapter discusses the leading international developments of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the better to locate British developments outlined in the following chapter. In the United States, university commercial education was part of the rapidly evolving higher education landscape of the late nineteenth century, although in every case courses of commercial education were created mostly using existing teaching provision. Even the creation of the Harvard Business School in 1908 did not alter this, and its ‘case study’ method only began to develop in the 1920s. In France, dedicated commercial colleges emerged in the 1860s, but these remained wedded to school curricula despite efforts to develop higher studies. Only in Germany did systematic higher business education develop before the First World War, but few outside Germany seemed aware of this.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124979143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Higher Commercial Education in Great Britain and Ireland","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Intermediate-level adult and commercial education was well established in Manchester and Liverpool by the last third of the nineteenth century, but the first dedicated Faculty of Commerce was founded in Birmingham in 1902, headed by William Ashley. There was, however, little local support for the initiative, which was moreover aimed at school-leavers, and the Faculty of Commerce created in Manchester shortly afterwards had much greater early success. The teaching of commerce in British and Irish universities was established by the 1920s, but there was a general failure to establish a curriculum and develop supporting texts and journals. By the later 1940s these early foundations were increasingly teaching economics, indicating the way in which commercial education in Britain was mainly a vehicle for the development of the teaching of economics.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128924024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Is ‘Marshallianism’?","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Marshall’s intellectual heritage is often described as ‘Marshallianism’, a general designation of his intellectual style as teacher and writer. But what exactly might this mean? While it is not necessarily wrong to describe his work in this way, it is necessary to have a clear idea of what the term denotes. To begin with, the work of Marshall is distinguished from that of his near (senior) contemporary, Stanley Jevons; but his death in 1882 came at a point when his version of economics had been gaining ground in Britain. While soon eclipsed by Marshall, this more formal approach later became the trademark of the London School of Economics in the 1920s, mediated by its Professor of Political Economy, Edwin Cannan. Then the work of Marshall as a teacher is examined, identifying an approach that sought to encourage students to apply their economic knowledge to the contemporary world. What he sought to inculcate in his students is shown by a discussion of the work of two of his students, A. C. Pigou and Sydney Chapman. This is then followed by a consideration of the composition and editorial changes to Marshall’s Principles of Economics, first published in 1890 and reaching a very much changed final edition in 1920, in which form it continued to be reprinted for much of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding the long life of this work, it can then be shown that, by the 1920s, criticism of Marshall’s approach to economic analysis was increasing, signalling the demise of the Marshallian heritage.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121988344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cambridge Tripos in Economic and Political Science","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter outlines the final phases of Alfred Marshall’s campaign to expand the teaching of economics in Cambridge by creating a three-year bachelor’s degree as the exclusive vehicle for the teaching of economics. Detailing the university politics and arguments employed for and against the teaching of economics, it shows why the particular content and structure of the curriculum took the form that it did. Some of this is a familiar story; but the founding of the new Tripos was only a new starting point, and too often it has simply been assumed that there is no need to consider how this new Tripos actually functioned in the ensuing years—the ‘success’ in creating the degree is read across to its subsequent history. By examining a database of student results over the first 50 years, a more nuanced picture is obtained. In particular, Marshall had laid great stress on a three-year programme. However, the degree was divided into a two-year Part I and a one-year Part II (revised to a one-year Part I/two-year Part II after 1930) and it can be shown that for some time a minority of students of economics completed three years: some just studied Part I, some just Part II. Furthermore, it can also be demonstrated that for most of the interwar years, students studying for three years were less successful in the final classification than those who had studied for Part II only.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129727400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Moral Sciences Tripos and Cambridge Political Economy","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The Cambridge Economics Tripos (an honours degree) was created in 1903 by detaching the teaching of economics in Cambridge from the Moral Sciences Tripos, a broad degree including logic, psychology, and politics and ethics. To understand why Alfred Marshall sought to detach the teaching of economics in this way we need to understand both the nature of this undergraduate programme of study, as well as the model that he sought to emulate: the Mathematical Tripos. This had been until mid-century the primary Cambridge qualification, and rather than a training in mathematics per se, its examination sought to foster a particular intellectual discipline. Students were trained in groups, usually by non-college private ‘coaches’, who drilled students in techniques with whose aid they might solve the questions put to them during several days of examinations. Good students became adept at the speedy selection of the appropriate technique and its application to a given problem. By contrast, the Moral Sciences Tripos was organised around the interpretation of set (canonical) books, and so did not foster this problem-solving approach.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123827255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unrealised Prospect of Historical Economics","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1880s a number of Oxford students took an interest in political economy, many of whom as students of history developed what has come to be seen as a ‘historical economics’ distinct from the kind of economics fostered in Cambridge by Alfred Marshall. Prominent among these was William Ashley, and also Arnold Toynbee, whose posthumous Lectures on the Industrial Revolution for the first time linked early nineteenth-century political economy directly to the idea of an ‘industrial revolution’, and interpreting British historical experience in these terms. Ashley had attended Toynbee’s lectures in Oxford and then co-edited them into the book; this chapter examines the kind of arguments that Toynbee put forward in the light of Ashley’s own early writings, and his teaching in Toronto and Harvard, where he was founding Professor of Economic History. Detailed examination of Toynbee’s text suggests that Ashley had a larger role in shaping it than hitherto realised, and this insight is then employed to make sense of Ashley’s subsequent ambivalence about contemporary economics, and his occasional disparagement of any economic reasoning that moved beyond the work of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848).","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125957430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commerce and Economics at the London School of Economics","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The London School of Economics was founded in 1895 to teach vocational and commercial subjects to part-time students. By 1920 the majority of students were full-time, studying the London BSc (Econ.) degree that was, however, a general social sciences degree for which very few students pursued the economics major option. The appointment of Lionel Robbins as Professor of Economics in 1929 opened the way for undergraduate teaching at the LSE to be moved towards economics, with staff appointments being made that would further this end. The bulk of the student body, however, continued to pursue a broad social sciences pathway, and it was only by shutting down the BCom degree in the later 1940s that Robbins was eventually able to bring about the shift from a broadly vocational school to one in which ‘modern’ social sciences dominated.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129028073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reconstructing the University","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘modern university’—research-based, in which teaching and research are pursued by academic specialists organised departmentally—was created in the United States in the later nineteenth century in a productive misunderstanding of the organisation of knowledge and teaching in contemporary German universities. While the latter enjoyed international recognition, academic careers remained in thrall to an apprenticeship structure in which senior staff represented their entire discipline, supported by their juniors. The American structure, fostered by endowments and grants, presumed that departments would be composed of specialists who advanced their careers by developing their specialism. This was decisive for the disciplinary development of universities around the world. In London, the university was a federal, administrative body whose degree courses could be followed both within Britain and in the wider Empire. As a component part of this structure, the London School of Economics shared in this reach, and so came to dominate the teaching of the social sciences in Britain and the Empire.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126463628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Scientisation of Economics","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Lionel Robbins was appointed head of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1929 following the sudden death of Allyn Young, the incumbent professor. Young had not made any significant alteration to the teaching at LSE, but from the very first Robbins set about reorganising the profile of economics teaching. The framework within which he did this was one of a ‘science’ based upon ‘economic principles’, and in 1932 his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science provided the methodological template for his project. This work appears to owe a great deal to Austrian economics, but it can be demonstrated that this was indirect, chiefly through the work of Wicksteed and Wicksell, hence reflecting economics where it had stood in the 1880s. Nonetheless, Robbins was successful in repackaging this work, and his Essay stimulated the development of discussions of economic method. In addition, Robbins’s lectures provided the template for the textbook literature of the 1950s, cementing the influence of the LSE on the training of young economists. However, this training remained at the undergraduate level for the most part due to the lack of labour market demand for economists in Britain; in the United States, by contrast, graduate teaching became the motor through which American economics came to dominate the international teaching of economics.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"87 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126296716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Not Oxford?","authors":"K. Tribe","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190491741.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The first undergraduate economics programme was created in Cambridge, but before his appointment Alfred Marshall was employed as a tutor by Balliol College Oxford. This chapter explains why, if Marshall had remained in Oxford, and even if he had succeeded the incumbent Professor of Political Economy, he would not have been able to achieve in Oxford what he did in Cambridge, after his appointment there in late 1884. The reason for this lies in the curricular differences between Oxford and Cambridge—in Oxford, Classics was the primary degree for much of the nineteenth century, with a minor Mathematics path—and also the relationship between college and university. In Cambridge, lecturing on the various Triposes was organised at the level of the university, by Special Boards of Study; arguments could therefore be made in university debates that could then result in university-wide changes. In Oxford, by contrast, lecturing was organised directly by colleges among themselves, cutting out the prospect of discussion at the level of the university itself. This and other differences between Oxford and Cambridge militated against the kind of innovations possible in Cambridge, with for example the establishment of the Natural Sciences Tripos in the 1870s.","PeriodicalId":308041,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Economic Science","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125100956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}